Preserving the writing of BB for posterity. Another project of the AntiPorn Activist Network.

It has come to my attention (thanks OAG!) that there’s a new thing in prostitution circles now. It’s the GFE, or rather, the “Girl Friend Experience”. Now, I am admittedly not readily familiar with more recent terminology in prostitution and so I hunted around a bit to find out what this GFE is all about.

Apparently it’s a prostitute that acts like a girlfriend. She has sex without a condom, french kisses and overall tries to play the part of her client’s girlfriend.

At first this really surprised me, then however it really began to make sense to me. As most of you know I was a stripper and I’ve shared stories before about how men would get very upset if you didn’t act like you enjoyed them buying your body. In fact, this was played out on one of the posts I did not too long ago. I mentioned how most strippers that I knew, myself included, would oftentimes be thinking horrible thoughts about the men they were giving lapdances for. We’d be focusing on their wacky hairdo or yellow teeth, really it was any little thing we could find wrong with them. Why? Because when you’re being bought and sold as a piece of meat it’s simply a self-defense mechanism to pick apart the looks, smile, hygiene or whatever else from the person who’s doing the buying.

In any case the article Stripping, my experience was immediately linked to from a hostile site. The tone of the article I wrote was that the women you are paying for actually resent you, and, in fact, instead of being awed by your manliness are probably laughing at you behind the scenes.

Quite frankly this pissed off the largely male audience at the hostile site and they went on to say some pretty vicious things about me for telling them that *gasp* a woman doesn’t actually love being treated as property. I didn’t bother to read the hostile link, mostly because I don’t really do that. Dubhe is the one who can’t seem to stop reading all the hateful things that are posted about me but I tend to ignore it because these folks aren’t my target audience and to be honest, they mean exactly jack shit to me. However, the reaction of anger that came from that post didn’t surprise me; I’ve confronted this mindset many times in my life.

Men who buy a woman’s body but also want her to be happy that they bought it. In fact, as a quick side trip (which really is related to this post I promise!) I’ll relay a story to you about something that happened early on in my relationship with Dubhe. Having been a stripper and an escort I have a special affinity and indeed, a special rage, in my heart over men who frequent these ‘businesses’. I’ve been at the receiving end of hordes of harassment and things that went well beyond what I was being paid to do. Of course, there is very little recourse for strippers when they are sexually harassed on the job. You sign up to take off your clothes and make some money but oftentimes the reality is men trying to finger your asshole or vagina as you walk past. Men spitting on you or pouring beer on you. Men throwing change at you or bottles or ashtrays. Men grabbing your hair, slapping, hitting, spitting and pushing.

These things are bound to create anger and frustration in ANY person who experiences them. With that in mind I get very, very angry at men who frequent these establishments. Now, as you all know Dubhe pulled himself from the bowels of the Patriarchy, he’s still learning, still growing and still working his ass off.

However, way back when we got on the topic of stripping and I found out that he had been to a strip club. I asked him if he knew that the woman hated him? I asked him if he knew that she was most likely looking at him through half closed eyes but inside she was suppressing a gag reflex that went a mile deep. I told him that it’s likely that she not only didn’t WANT to be getting off some slob with a lap dance but that she most likely actively HATED him on some level. That she may have, at some point, been fantasizing about stabbing his eyes out with an ice pick. I know I did.

His reaction was normal insofar as this sort of thing goes. He was offended. He was surprised and offended that she wouldn’t like him. He was pouty and frustrated and assured me that I was wrong, that the girl couldn’t have felt that way about him because “I was a (can anyone fill in the blank?)…..”NICE GUY” after all, I didn’t grope her and I didn’t say lewd things to her, I was a “NICE GUY!”

Of course, I pointed out that it took vast quantities of entitlement and privilege to believe for one instant that you can BUY a human being and that they’ll be somehow happy and grateful to you for doing them the honor. Not to mention, if you were such a NICE GUY, then why did you buy the use of her body to begin with?

Dubhe is not isolated in his reaction to men finding out that the woman they just bought and used was not ecstatically happy about being nothing more than a piece of meat for your pudgy hard on. Oftentimes with these men I like to ask them a series of questions, “Did you ever think about her life? Did you ever give a shit about her past? Her experiences? Did you ever even realize that she had a fucking NAME?”

Of course they never really think about any of those things but yet, they expect the woman that they’re buying to think about all those things about them. Can anyone tell that this is something that bothers the fuck out of me? *cough* to get back on topic, the point of all that was to illustrate that this phenomenon of Girl Friend Experience doesn’t really surprise me.

Men, by and large, don’t only want to buy women but they want women to enjoy being bought. When they find out that a woman doesn’t really love being bought and sold they get angry, pouty and indignant. It would be funny if it weren’t so fucking insulting. When they find out that, in fact, the object they purchased wasn’t very happy with them their little porn-induced world illusion is shattered. It oftentimes comes as a complete surprise to these guys that women don’t actually lurve being humiliated, degraded and purchased like a rat terrier. It really becomes a sort of paradigm smasher when it becomes obvious that many of these women actively dislike them.

Why? Well it’s simple really; women know that we are ‘othered’ all the time. To hear men talk we’re not like them at all. We enjoy having babies, changing diapers and then being anally fucked by our husbands at night. Of course, men don’t or wouldn’t enjoy that themselves but women do because they’re the ‘other’. Women just like degrading things because they’re just ‘different’. Things that men would hate women just lap up.

This is a classic example of ‘othering’ we are the other; we are something fundamentally different from men. Therefore, men can watch a woman being raped by a Great Dane and actually believe that some women just LOVE to be raped by Great Danes because, well, women are just ‘different’. (which, btw, I’ve been meaning to do a post on. Bestiality and porn, it promises to be quite long and, hopefully, good) When they find out that women don’t like so many of the things that they themselves would abhor then suddenly they can’t be ‘othered’ quite as easily.

So, a man coming face to face with an angry woman who is telling them that the stripper they paid to give them a lapdance could have been fantasizing about poking his eyeballs from his sockets with an icepick is generally turned on as the enemy because she is smashing his nice, neat little paradigm (the sound of the indignation, wrath, poutiness and general bashing that ensues is the sound of a paradigm shifting without a clutch).

People in general, and men in specific, do not at all enjoy being faced with the reality that a woman is not ‘other’. That we like and dislike most of the same things that men would like or dislike. When they realize this they get angry because it would infer that they’re doing something wrong. If THEY wouldn’t like being bought as a cum receptacle and they’re finding out that women may not like being bought as a cum receptacle it becomes much more difficult to keep that wall of disassociation in place. We can no longer be ‘othered’ and this means that the man must suddenly decide whether he’s really the ‘nice guy’ he always thought he was.

In any case when I heard about this I was reminded immediately of the “nice guy” syndrome as it pertains to stripping and the parts of the industry I was involved with. If a dude wasn’t throwing ashtrays at you, slapping your breasts or pulling your hair he was a ‘nice guy’ and therefore you were expected to be slaveringly grateful to them. The fact that they had just bought you doesn’t mean that they’re not a ‘nice guy’, no, of course not. It just means that they’re normal men and thus are able to distinguish themselves from those ‘not nice guys’.

This is possible only because of the ‘othering’ that I talked about further up. They reason that because we are ‘other’ then it’s possible and indeed, quite likely, that we simply can’t be understood and therefore it’s possible and even likely that we enjoy the treatment that they would find ing, humiliating and debasing.

So, does it surprise me that men suddenly want, not just a hole, but a hole that acts like it’s happy to be a hole? No, not really. Think for a moment about the encounters you’ve had with men. Perhaps it was with your husband or your lover. You didn’t feel like having sex but maybe he was nagging and nagging and nagging and you thought it would just be easier to give in. You sigh and say, “Fine, whatever. Hurry up and get it over with!”

How did that go over? I know that for me when I’ve been in this situation the guy who pushed you so hard just a scant second before will normally look at you as if you’ve just grown a third arm. “Well, no. If you’re going to be THAT way about it!” is the usual reply. The attitude that follows is often sulky, nasty tempered and grouchy, in my case it would also be very dangerous for me. So, after one or two instances like this you quickly learn that you’re not just expected to give up sex, but to act as though you enjoy it. To do otherwise would result in the nasty paradigm shifting discussed earlier and since you’re the closest target then the rage a man experiences over having his ‘othering’ challenged will be directly aimed at you.

So what do we do? Oftentimes we sigh internally but externally we act as though we’re into him and while he’s going at it and we’re screaming that almost ridiculously falsetto porn scream we are internally ticking off what we need to buy for groceries the next day.

Make no mistake about it, they want to fuck you but they want you to ACT like you WANT them to fuck you. We are not only expected to fuck on demand but to ENJOY fucking on demand. Wanna make any guesses where this idea that she loves fucking all the time every time comes from? Anyway, back to the post. Apparently men are paying more for prostitutes who will give them a GFE, which is really just a fancy way of saying, “I’ll pay you more to act like you like being bought”.

Seriously, think about this for a moment. The guys who pay for a GFE are perhaps the worst of the lot because they already recognize that prostitutes most certainly do not really want them, and have definitely realized that many prostitutes are downright disgusted by them but yet they don’t give a fuck.

They already KNOW that the prostitute doesn’t like them but have decided that she is so much of an object that she can FAKE liking him and his conscience is clear. And, in a good many of them, knowing that she doesn’t want him fucking with her but paying her to pretend she does gives him a great big chubby dick from the mere thought of the control.

He deliberately ignores that a prostitute is likely disgusted by him but it doesn’t matter, and, in fact, he is likely getting off on that knowledge. With a guy like this we can’t even give him the benefit of the doubt by saying, “Well, I dunno, maybe he thought that she really liked him” with a nervous shrug and a hopeful look. No, we KNOW that this guy is aware that the woman doesn’t like him and most likely wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole any other time. He KNOWS this, so he just goes ahead and pays her more money to pretend and the owner paradigm fits completely into place with this final indignation. Dude, talk about buying someone heart and soul.

Then of course there’s the entitlement aspect. The men who engage in such a thing not only believe that it’s right and appropriate to buy away a woman’s loathing of them and that she should act like she likes it, but they also believe that they, for whatever reason, have a right to a relationship. They have a right to buy another human being, use it, discard it, and she should pretend that she enjoys it. Wow, talk about living in a fantasy. Talk about male entitlement and privilege.

The women who are doing this are, of course, opening themselves to great risk. They’re at huge risk of contracting diseases, some of them fatal, so that a guy can completely and entirely ‘own’ that woman for the period of time it takes for him to fuck her and get his rocks off on whatever porn induced fetish he has.

And make no mistake about it, the fact that she doesn’t like him and she’s pretending she does anyway is a big part of this. He’s controlling her and he’s forcing her to do something she doesn’t want to do because this system has placed women squarely in poverty just so they can have a sex class to use when they want it. That sort of power is what these guys are craving. So, not only does she have to endure degrading anal sex by a man she doesn’t know but she has to kiss him and smile and pretend that he’s not hurting her either. This GFE is the epitome of exercising complete and universal control over another human being. These men are buying not only a human being but the outward expression of that human being’s emotions. They’re putting her at tremendous risk in their frenzy to control and dominate another person and indeed, it’s part of what gets them off.

This has nothing to do with a poor lonely guy looking for someone to play pretend with. No, not in a million years. It has everything to do with controlling the minds of the objects you bought. These are privileged men who believe that they have some immutable ‘right’ to purchase a woman and that she should like being purchased. It has nothing to do with tenderness or closeness and everything to do with the thrill of paying a woman enough money that you can inflict upon her any number of STD’s and it’s too damned bad for her. What a power trip it must be to know that you have not only bought the wet holes for your use but that those holes will act as though they enjoy it while you do any manner of degrading things to them that you want, and it’s just an extra bonus that she has no idea whether your infecting her with AIDS or any number of STD’s.

Don’t be fooled. These guys aren’t looking for a girlfriend. They’re not looking for tenderness, kissing, touching and so on. They’re looking for the ultimate control and domination that money will buy. They’re looking at being able to do anything they want and knowing that she will pretend to enjoy every second of it.

It never ceases to amaze me what new, controlling, domineering and violating thing men are capable of cooking up. I am endlessly amazed by how much power white males have in this society and how they are still seeking more. How the power of being the ruling class is not enough for them. How the power of buying a body for their use is not enough for them. How the power of the fear of a rape culture is not enough for them. How the power of living in a world in which women are displayed, contorted and free to every man who wants a quick power trip isn’t enough for them. They must continue to work up new and better ways of taking more power and more control. Up to and including buying not just the body, but the outward expression of emotion from that body as well and then getting off on that expressed power. The power to dominate and own, the power to hurt and cause fear and yet, they still crave more.

And you know what the really ironic part is? The part that makes my gut kind of twist in a sickening grind? It’s the fact that these men will come to the prostitutes asking for a GFE and they’ll be entirely focused on feeling badly for themselves. How horrible their pathetic little lives are that no woman will touch them with a ten foot pole. How sad for them that nobody has yet to be able to see what a kind, generous caring dude he is. And they’ll go on and on about how their wives are cold-hearted bitches or how the women are never able to see what a great catch he is.

They’ll go on and on about what a ‘nice guy’ they are and how there’s nothing wrong with HIM but rather women just like ‘bad boys’ or women are so shallow that they can’t see what a fucking gem he is. He’ll go on and on and on about his torturous life of pain and torment and loneliness but you know what will never, ever cross his tiny little mind? The fact that the woman he is paying to pretend to be his girlfriend is drug addicted and she grew up with her stepfather raping her from the age of 7. And how, at the age of 12 she left the house because her mother didn’t believe her and she ran away to avoid further abuse. And how she is now only 15 and is working as a prostitute who is trying like hell to just stay off the streets and how she’ll be servicing two more men that night after he is done with her.

None of that actually occurs to these men. The ‘talkers’ want to go on and on about their horrible wives or horrible girlfriends or they want to chat it up about how they’re really prince charming but no woman can see how amazing and wonderful they are. And all the while they will ignore or gloss over the fact that the woman they are currently speaking to has been bought and is about to be used for her cunt. It’s all about how bad their lives are but never, for a moment, do any of them say, “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. How about you take this $100.00 and use it to pay the rent with. No strings attached, you don’t have to fuck me. Just take this because I don’t like the fact that I’m paying to own another human being.”

Originally published on April 07, 2006

I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long while. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to find my numbers and such until just now. Originally this idea was intended to run for a week, each day a different installment until, on Friday we completed the idea. However, I feel like undertaking this task today.

I want to discuss the ‘tiers of harm’ associated with pornography. At every level of pornography, from the making, to the distribution to the watching and to every single woman in society there is harm.

It makes sense to start at the beginning, and the beginning in this case is making pornography. Now, for the purposes of this series of articles I want everyone to understand that when I’m referring to pornography or the sex industry or prostitution I am using the terms almost interchangeably. The difference between pornography and prostitution is really just a ghost line that is put in place by those who wish to separate themselves from ‘those other people’. In this instance the ‘other people’ are the ones who buy prostitutes. Societally speaking pornography is more accepted than buying a prostitute, therefore people have a much easier time aligning themselves with this ‘very different’ (to use their words) aspect of the sex industry.

I also want to note that you will see me using scare quotes through this article when referring to women who ‘get something out of it’. This is not a post debating whether or not they are actually getting something out of prostituting themselves which is why the scare quotes are there. The assumption is that prostitutes and porn stars are ‘getting something out of it’ and I will leave that alone for another day. Ok, on with the show.

First we must understand that the two are indistinguishable in a practical sense. Pornography is prostitution, but the fact that not just one man is using the prostitute puts it into a different category in the law.

It stands to reason that in a society where women are to be available to all men all the time that prostitution would fall into an altogether different category than pornography. The line drawn between the two is truly a false dichotomy, the real reason that lay at the heart of the legalization and, in fact, mainstreaming of one, whilst the other is a more ‘seedy’ underside is not too hard to understand.

In porn the woman is available for ALL men, all the time. Every man who sees her can ‘fuck’ her, even if only through the male who is present in the movie. She is truly the whore, the free hooker, the slut that every man can do with what they will (either in the actual making of or in the viewing of).

Prostitutes on the other hand are only fucking a small percentage of men; therefore, since they are not offering their object status to each and every single man who desires it, it is a far more taboo idea.

Of course, at its base, porn and prostitution are the same thing. In both of them a woman exchanges sex for money but in one of them it is filmed, in the other, it’s a private interaction in which it has been argued the prostitute is getting ‘something out of it’. With this false idea of the prostitutes ‘getting something out of it’ the degradation is not complete enough for society’s liking. Without the benefit of allowing every man the ability to use her, she has not been punished enough for ‘getting something out of it’.

In other words, pornography allows the entire male population to use and degrade her sexually and that works off any ‘benefit’ she may get from the act. In this case money. A woman who derives any benefit from selling her sex is a maligned creature indeed. With the porn star we can take away any and all ‘benefit’ that she is perceived to have received by making her fodder for every man to degrade. That’s a tradeoff that the Patriarchy will make.

One woman gets paid a few hundred bucks to be an object of degradation, humiliation and objectification for millions of men. Her image is forever sealed, her degradation posed and captured at it’s finest to be stored in the annuls of time. At any moment, 1 year, 5 years or 30 years later she can be recalled by any man who wants to degrade her without ramification. All for a few hundred bucks. Of course it’s a great deal for the Patriarchy. They get a collection of women, thousands of unnamed stories and faces that are frozen in the very act of degradation that man gets so much pleasure from. Exposed and captured at their most vulnerable they represent the culmination of Patriarchal power, a thing to be seized by each and every member of society and jerked off too gleefully as proof of male power and domination.

The porn star is maligned because she is perceived to have gotten some ‘benefit’ from having sold herself. Women hate her because men seem to love her, Men hate her because she displays a lack of character so complete (to the men) that they are incapable of feeling anything but revulsion at her, after they use her to orgasm to. It’s true. The porn star is maligned because she has become what society has trained her to be. She is maligned by the men who display and overwhelming disgust of her when they are done using her. That disgust is often rooted in the very acts that they desire but are disgusted by. The very acts that they would never do or allow to be done to them builds a disgust of the very women that will do it. It’s a case of projection at it’s finest but that’s also not what this is about. Suffice it to say that society hates the porn star, but she is also mainstream and acceptable precisely because of her degradation and the fact that millions of men all over the world can, at any time now or in the future, use her and reinforce her status as a dehumanized thing.

The very thing that makes her hated and maligned is also the very thing that makes what she does acceptable. Why? Because she has taken her punishment for being such a despicable creature, she is allowed to exist BECAUSE she takes her punishment, that punishment being that she is forever a nameless, faceless object to uphold the tenets of male domination.

The prostitute however, has no such tradeoff. She is not being degraded enough according to the patriarchy. Millions of men cannot fuck one prostitute. The entire society of males cannot degrade one prostitute, it’s not feasible. Unlike the porn star, her audience is only a relatively small group of men who are in physical proximity to the individual woman. Her punishment for merely having female genitalia and then, ‘getting something out of it’ (presumably money) is too much of an affront to the patriarchal construct. She is selling herself in private to only one man, or a series of singular men and the belief is that she’s ‘getting something out of it’ therefore, she has not been punished enough.

Under this system a woman not only cannot be perceived as ‘getting something out of it’ but she must be punished for anything she does get out of it no matter how small. The system dictates that she must be available without reservation, without any thought to herself at all times. If and when a woman is perceived as having ‘gotten something out of it’ she is reviled and degraded all the more.

The prostitute flies in the face of patriarchal norms in that way. She is a woman who is perceived as ‘getting something out of it’, taboo at best, hated at worst. The reality of whether she actually does ‘get something out of it’ is up for debate but the perception is still there.

It is because of this reality that prostitution has more of a stigma attached to it than pornography. Both women are prostitutes, one of them can be said to ‘suffer’ more than the other if only because every man has access to their degradation for an unknown number of years whereas with the prostitute only a small percentage of men have been allowed to degrade that particular woman and for most of them the only memory and ‘proof’ that they have is in their memories. There is also the matter of her not being ‘available’ for an infinite number of years. Eventually the prostitute will get old, die or otherwise be unable to be degraded. Also, there is no ‘proof’ that she was degraded enough in prostitution, therefore the societal taboo is harsher.

Lawmakers have decided that prostitution is illegal in many places. Based, unknown to them I suspect, upon the model I just discussed. With porn men can degrade her ‘safely’, from a distance, any man, at any time. With prostitutes you must ‘pay’ to degrade them, therefore, in the mind of male privilege, the prostitute comes out ahead, or at least even. The truth of that statement can again be debated, but this is what the men believe when they go to prostitutes.

This could perhaps, (I haven’t thought about it too much yet) even be the reason that prostitutes are far more likely to be raped than anyone else. Their degradation is not complete enough, selling their bodies by some men can be too easily construed as her ‘getting something out of it’ (money). The retaliation is rape and degradation that defies the accepted limits of degradation afforded to porn stars.

The porn star is paid once and then subject to abuse by anyone at any time. She is the creature who appears to love the abuse and degradation that the patriarchy is so adept at providing. Therefore, HER abuse is legal precisely BECAUSE of that.

A woman who gets anything out of sex is a maligned creature indeed, even if the perception of her is wrong, even if she is being harmed by the sex it doesn’t matter. If the perception is that she is getting something out of it then she is hated. The slut is hated for precisely this reason, as is the prostitute, as is the woman who just knows what she wants in bed. ANY sort of perceived ‘benefit’ is reason enough for men to revile her. The ‘benefit’ could be enjoyment of the sex act, or her saying “No” to him. It can be money, power, anything she does that lends to a perception of benefit.

A man who ‘nags’ his partner into sex probably stopped giving a shit about the actual orgasm involved after the 3rd “No”. It becomes a battle of wills that the man must win. Why? Because she is perceived as having gotten a ‘benefit’ from her sex, in this case, the ‘benefit’ of being able to say “No”.

The prostitute is similarly hated because her ‘benefit’ is money. She got money but didn’t get degraded enough to ‘pay’ for that money.

The porn star, on the other hand, is understood to have been suitably degraded, it can be clear that she has gotten the short end of the stick on this one. Her image and likeness and even her rape (Deep Throat) are proof enough that she is degraded enough to be allowed to ‘benefit’ from the measly few hundreds of dollars she received. Even after the woman is dead and in the ground her likeness, her essence and her body is still open to male degradation.

Porn and prostitution are the same thing. The only difference is that the porn star makes no bones about privacy, indeed, she is captured in the very act of ‘allowing’ herself to be degraded so that millions of men can, in turn, get off on that degradation. The prostitute has the audacity to require it to be only one man, not millions, and her degradation is not complete enough for societies liking.

This is the reason that one is legal and one isn’t. It has nothing to do with Freedom of Speech and everything to do with the levels of degradation that men perceive them having taken.

So, to start off this series I wanted to tell everyone exactly why I will use the two interchangeably. They are the same thing in every aspect. One is legal, one is heralded as being ‘helpful to relationships’ and ‘harmless fantasy’. But don’t be fooled, the sex industry is just that an industry. Some women have paid enough and the Patriarchy is willing to strike a deal with them while others haven’t paid enough and are therefore more maligned and more ‘taboo’ than the other.

And this, my friends, is my intro to porn week which will resume on Monday (unless I crank out the next post over the weekend).

First of all, if you are a male and you frequent strip clubs and use escorts, I want you to know that those women hate you.

If you’ve ever given money to a stripper, you’ve probably given money to a girl or woman who has spent the last 20 minutes laughing at you, either with the other girls or on the inside. You buy a lap dance and inside she’s criticizing you, laughing at you, mocking you. She’s mocking what you’re wearing, how you’re speaking and everything about you.

When a man would pay me to give him a lap dance I would spend the entire time internally laughing at his breath, his pimples, his fat belly, anything and everything I could. These women hate you, and no amount of money you can give them will make them like you any more.

I was underage when I was enmeshed in this life; I had just gotten a car and I was barely 16 years old. I can remember, very vividly, the first night I stripped. I was terrified. That first night was at a hotel that was pretty strict with its nudity policy, and all I had to do was wear lingerie and then try to sell it and garters. Easy…right?

I nearly chickened out entirely, but I had just been kicked out and needed that paycheck, I needed the promised tips and the ‘big money’ that everyone talked about. I was young and scared and needed to come up with my rent money quickly. Deanna was trying out her first night as an escort while I began here, in the hotel. It was terrifying, but I got through it. Halfway through the night customers began buying me drinks. I don’t know how many I consumed but I remember being concerned about driving home.

Through that period of time I not only stripped. I also did bachelor parties and worked as an escort. The degradation and terror that is always there is just another part of the job. The hands, the greasy, disgusting hands, were always there, groping at you while the eyes were staring at you. I was little more than a walking Barbie doll, and I was critiqued by some, and worshipped by others. Of course, that worship consisted of men telling me what “nice tits” I had, or how they’d like to “bang that pussy”.

See, here’s the deal: just as the men who come to the bar have to be completely devoid of empathy for the women they’re buying, the women also have to be completely devoid of empathy for the men who are buying them. It’s a survival thing, and besides, how can we like you when you’re paying to own us? No, oftentimes women will think and fantasize about smashing your head in with a baseball bat while they gyrate in your lap. But of course, we can’t really do that can we? For whatever reason, we must allow ourselves to be bought and sold for the erections that men get over the power associated with owning a human being.

So, while we may be thinking about how disgusting your teeth are, how horrible your breath is, what a stupid shirt you’re wearing and how we’d like to run a cheese grater over your smug face, we’re smiling and looking at you through submissive eyes as we robotically rub our bodies over yours. But that anger has to go somewhere doesn’t it? And, just as with everything else, it does. The anger turns into something else, and oftentimes it is turned inwards. We starve ourselves and abuse ourselves, and let you abuse us because we believe we deserve it. Other times we dull the pain, using alcohol and downers to rid ourselves of the anger, to crush it and keep it in check.

Most often we use several of these options simultaneously. We turn our anger onto other women, onto ourselves and onto our children but we can’t turn that anger onto men; that would be too dangerous. We learn, very early on and particularly when we strip, that men are dangerous. They are more dangerous than anything else we’ve ever known.

Be assured that the stripper you see hates you. She drowns her hatred in alcohol, or burns it in a cloud of pot smoke, but she’s still angry.

The life of a stripper is a life of sexual harassment. Men grope at you constantly, trying to put their fingers inside of you when you walk past. You are called names, and told to “Bring that cunt over here you little whore”. And you do. You bring it over there because you’ve told yourself that you are powerful when you do so. That’s yet another way to control the anger and the humiliation. You wrap it in empowerment, telling yourself that you’re the one who’s really coming out on top. You tell yourself that you’re the winner because that nasty fucker gave you every bill in his wallet, but deep down inside you know what’s really going on and you continue to medicate, you continue a cycle of ups and downs.

Sometimes, as a 16-year-old stripper, I would find myself on the floor of my rented bedroom at Deanna’s house, surrounded by the things I had taken from my room at my parent’s house. I had a stuffed clown and large black and white stuffed panda bear. At times I would fall into a heap on the floor of that bedroom, an ashtray and a can of Old Milwaukee beer at my feet, while I cried into the fur of that panda bear. I remember thinking that if one more man tried to stick his fingers inside of me that night then I’d fucking kill myself. I remember looking longingly at kitchen knives but always being too terrified to actually do it. And then, about an hour before we were due to leave, Deanna might knock softly on the door.

Sometimes, we lay on that floor together and cried. Me, a 16 year old girl with a bag of vibrators, dildos and anal beads stuffed into a briefcase for use with my ‘clients’ on the escort side of the business, and Deanna, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman whose face showed more pain than any face I have known before or since. Sometimes we’d cry on the floor of that bedroom and then, after our tears were spent, we’d stand and smile and hug each other and go about the task of getting our things together.

We’d change into our makeup and our clothes and we’d leave and drive to whatever club we were due at, or to the office itself to await the phone calls of the men who wanted to buy us.

As a 16 year-old stripper I had men throw alcohol on me, I’ve been spit on and then been paid to rub it into my skin. I’ve been fingered by complete strangers as I walked past them. I’ve been slapped, grabbed, pinched and mauled by several men at once. I was called names and had my hair pulled. I’ve had men take their dicks out of their pants and I’ve had men cum in their pants during a lapdance and then try to stick their hands in my mouth.

I’ve had men ask me my age, and on the rare occasion when I would tell them the truth, perhaps from some hope that they could help me, they told me that I was the same age as their daughter and then offered me money to sleep with them. I’ve heard sob stories about their horrible wives and families, and how the bitch stopped putting out as soon as he put a ring on their finger. I’ve heard all the stories, all the lies and all the bullshit.

I’ve had men call me the most vile things imaginable and I’ve had them pay me to do the sort of degrading things I can’t even talk about.

The anger that stems from this is all consuming; it eats away at you slowly, despite the efforts you make to contain it. A full 17 years later and I’m still enraged. The seed that was planted all those years ago has turned into a tree and that tree has branches that are vast. Every thread of anger goes down another path until I find even more anger at the end of it.

I remember now how angry men would get at me when I told them that the woman who stripped for them the night before was most likely silently laughing at your hair or teeth or bad clothes. I think about how angry men have become when I tell them that the poor woman whom he tossed his $20 at would probably just as soon have gouged his eyes out with her nails as looked at him. I remember how mad these guys got, how they seem to think that they should be able to buy not only the bodies of these women to degrade and to use, but that these women should also be grateful for it, they should actually like him.

They think to them, “Hey, I’m a nice guy! I was nice to her!” but never once do they connect the fact that buying another human being for the purpose of controlling that human is NOT a ‘nice guy’ thing to do. Of course she should like it, she’s a whore and she should love it when I give her money for doing what she would normally be doing for free anyway. They always seem so shocked when I tell them the extent of the hate. When I tell them the things that us girls would say behind their backs, or after our set when we would get back to the house. These men seem livid and surprised that we would discuss how you were so fucking disgusting that it was all we could do not to throw up on you. Then, we’d knock back another shot.

Thinking about these guys, these men who get insulted that the object they purchased wasn’t particularly enamored with them, makes me even more irate.

The rage still consumes me, the anger lies just below the surface.

I remember it well, and now as I sit here typing on my laptop in my bedroom I realize that the anger and indignation is still just below the surface. I am disgusted by them. I am enraged at them. At this moment I can say that I literally HATE each and every single man who thought it was his entitlement to BUY a human being.

I learned that it wasn’t about sexual excitement for these guys; it was about entitlement and degradation. It was about power and control, it was about owning another person, another human being. They were rarely just happy with just buying us, they wanted to degrade us and make us perform disgusting acts for them. I know that these men who visit strip clubs and who watch pornography and who pay prostitutes would also buy a slave to work the fields if they thought they could get away with it. These men who like to believe that they are forward-thinking ‘nice’ guys are the same men who would buy a slave, and to be completely honest, I don’t give a flying fuck if that enrages them or not. These are the men that would buy another human being because they get off on power and control.

Buying a woman is little different than buying a slave, and I’ve been bought before. Cloaking it in ‘free will’ is a lie, a great big steaming lie. How much ‘free will’ does a 16 year-old have when she’s been kicked out? Every girl I knew, every single one of them that I worked with, had stories. Those stories are stories that curdle the blood, stories of rape and incest, stories laden with abuse and selling the only thing they had of value in this society.

There is no doubt in my mind that these very men would purchase slaves, sexual or otherwise to work their fields and jerk them off when they wanted it.

Men who buy and look at pornography are exactly the same. These are also men who feed off of power and degradation the way a tick feeds off blood. They are parasites and they are incapable of finding any worth within themselves, therefore, they steal it from women, they take it and use it and then they look for more power when the rush of degradation has worn off. They believe, with every fiber of their being, that they have a right to buy human beings.

I want, once and for all, for men to know that women in the sex industry have been abused by men just like you. Rape and incest are the recruiters for the sex industry, and you are victimizing her just as her rapist did. She hates you and she hates all that you represent. She smiles because she must smile, she dances because she knows no other way, but she despises you and others like you.